Question

I have to develop a scanning application for the Canon 9000F, but I’m having troubles with WIA and TWAIN. I’ve read on the SANE project’s home page that this specific scanner works pretty well with their technology, so I would be interested if it is possible to use the SANE backend on Windows platforms.

I found some information on this website: http://www.zago.net/sane/windows/sane_on_windows.html

SANE on Windows:
The port has been integrated in the CVS tree on september 23rd, 2003.
It will be available in SANE release 1.0.13.

Windows is also listed as platform on the SANE’s wikipedia page:

Operating system: Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, OS/2

Answer 1

In spite of this very interesting thread: sane runs in windows without cygwin I think that your only really viable option for using SANE on Windows is to use Cygwin or MinGW with MSYS. From the README.windows file:

SANE on Windows

Prerequisites

To be able to compile sane-backends, you need to have either Cygwin or
Mingw compilers and a suitable POSIX compatible environment.

You can get the Cygwin POSIX compatible environment for Windows
Windows and the Cygwin gcc compiler at http://www.cygwin.com

You can get the MSYS POSIX compatible environment for Windows and the
MinGW gcc compiler at http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

The scanner must be detected by Windows and not be disabled. Check
with the hardware manager.

Once you have either of those, you can untar and build SANE from the source code (check the readme for the required libraries) and it may or may not work with your Canon 9000F Scanner.

As you say, the chances are good that it will work as it is listed as supported under the pixma backend.